The US chooses not to end homelessness. We have the highest GDP in the world. We could end it if we wanted to.
I was in Japan recently. A choice was made there as well.
I was in Japan recently. A choice was made there as well.
Japan's culture is why those things are the way they are. It's not due to funding. It's because people raise their children differently than we do in the west. The family's obligations are also greater.
And, yes, there are homeless people in Japan. But they typically are invisible by choice because of their cultural norms around discretion.
https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1235140/
I can't help but think that homelessness in downtown San Francisco is a spectacle.
For one thing, there has been a decision to concentrate people there, which is why people think homelessness is worse in SF than LA, whereas I understand there are more homeless per capita in LA. If you tried to "live outside" in a residential area I think the authorities would deal with you as harshly they would deal with anyone who tried to build more housing.
The messages are: (1) you'd better not stand up to your jackass boss because this could be you, (2) you'd better not ask politicians for a more generous welfare state (especially in the bluest state in America) because we'll never give it to you.
The major issue with US even in blue cities is how apathetic they are to build new infrastructure (homes, roads, hospitals, schools) e.t.c
At the end of the day demand-supply dynamics dictate the price.
Finland (pop 5.5M) Norway (pop 5.5M) Sweden (pop 10M)
I look at WA state with a similar population 7M , and higher GDP from tech boom at ~$700B
Seattle & Bellevue should have solved homelessness, but that is not the case. Millions are spent on homeless but little towards long term solving of the solution.
There is a lot of money to be made by many problems not being solved.
It’s very difficult to address culture in the US without being accused of victim blaming or bias.
But the uncomfortable truth is that some cultural practices simply do produce better neighbors and coworkers and compatriots than do others.
For example:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain...
That only took a few thousand years and still isn't really there yet.
They delivered the results, and there's nothing you can say that changes the facts. You seem to really want to believe, and everyone to believe, how hopeless you are.
1) I have.
2) There are plenty of homeless or impoverished people in India, they just don't come to the US. Immigrants need a visa or permanent residency, and that usually comes with a requirement to maintain a job or have some level of financial security. Later generation Indian-Americans are, hopefully, kept out of poverty by the work their parents and families put in to establish a foothold in the US. But none of this is guaranteed; homelessness can happen to just about anyone if they have the right run of bad luck, and one's culture is only a small part of that equation.
I have a friend right now who is in a precarious housing situation who has schizophrenia but does not have a DX and has no insight into her condition. If my wife tries to set a time to pick her up and take her out to our farm, odds are 1/10 that she will really be there, will really get in the car, will not get out of the car for some hare-brained reason or otherwise not make it out. You've got to have the patience of a saint to do anything for her.
If she had some insight into her condition she could go to DSS and get TANF and then get on disability and have stable housing but she doesn't. No matter how I try to bring up the issue that she does have a condition she just "unhears" it.
Indians and other people from traditional cultures have stronger "family values" and won't wash their hands of intractable relatives the way people who grew up in the US monoculture will. (Or if they do it, they'll do it in a final way)
Why might it be rare to see a homeless member of a group whose members make up less than 2% of the population in the US to start with and are largely recent immigrants (15% immigrating within the last 5 years!), often under work-based visa programs targeting highly-skilled workers that are well paid?
Could it be cultural superiority of the cultures from which they are drawn? Could it be some other thing that makes them rare among the US homeless?
Hard to tell, I'm sure.
The people of India started from even worse poverty and have generally made progress (especially since recently-deceased PM Singh). I'm not criticizing. But holding forth India's culture [1] as a model of preventing homelessness is pretty incredible.
[1] India may have the largest, most diverse collection of 'cultures' within one national border in the world, so which one are we talking about?
I'm shocked when politicians in America blame our homelessness problem on poverty. Poor people do not behave this way. This is a breakdown in culture.
It's weird growing up in the 90s as an American and visiting India and thinking that America was better than that because we are so rich and no one is that poor, but 30 years later, it no longer seems that way. While India is still very poor, I think even the homeless there might have a more stable life than what I physically see on the streets of west coast America. I mean.. it may be a slum, but at least they have a permanent house, their kids are in school, etc.
Meanwhile, in Portland, I see human feces on many streets, and the homeless are drugged out zombies (Portland has enough beds for all homeless but no ability to force usage of shelter beds, and few homeless person accepts the offer).
I hate to say it, but maybe just allowing a 'proper' slum would be a better option.
Homelessness goes down in places where housing is cheap and also in places where the government intervenes sensibly.
The first to solve it is punished with tens of thousands of newly arriving homeless who, as you might imagine, will find a way to get there if it means not being homeless anymore. But budgets are finite and the cost per homeless must he higher than zero, but in a practical sense the number of homeless aren't entirely finite.
If you start from the other end, with the feds, then you might as well hold your breath. Homelessness is so far down the list of priorities, that even if it somehow did bubble to the top, the polarization in Congress will sabotage any effort, and we'll end up with boondoggles that both sides can criticize and that won't really help any homeless at all.
This isn't a choice being made, it's just the complexity of the real world that some are still blind to even after graduating college and (theoretically) turning into grownups.
There's actually a technical solution too, but since it's dry and boring, most leftists (and quite a few of the rightists) find it too boring to ever want to try. Obviously the solution is either love and compassion (from the left) or maybe "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" (from the right).
You're not wrong in the fact that America is a shit country designed to intentionally to use homelessness as an implicit threat against the working class. You are wrong in the sense that all the things you listed aren't reasons, just excuses to cover up the intentionality of homelessness, and that homelessness could be solved if there was the political will to do so. Which there will never be in the USA because again, the homelessness crisis is intentional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
California has 30% of the US homeless population, but 11% of it's total population. It is dramatically disproportional, period.
https://shou.senate.ca.gov/sites/shou.senate.ca.gov/files/Ho...
I think housing prices does make the homeless problem worse, but it didn't create it. Good climate and numerous public services did.
Finland got to 0 by giving everybody a place to live, not by kicking the homeless out of their country.
Will politicians ever do it? No, they're in the pocket of the military and the 1%. Will voters ever vote for it? No, they're fed a steady stream of propaganda that tells them that this would be "socialism". But that's how the problem would be solved.
I've seen nothing to support this claim. It does fit the right-wing disinformation pattern of demonizing people, encouraging division and hate between people, undermine social programs, and making baseless claims to put others in the defensive position of having to disprove them.
Can you support that claim?
Here's some evidence to the contrary, from another comment: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30739834/
Many drug addicts don't want to be addicted, and would try to go through treatment if provided. But some are inveterate, and don't want to quit. What do you do with them?
And, to be quite blunt: If someone wants to be a meth-head, there's plenty of ways to consume it that don't create hazards for other people.
Edit: I think it's perfectly acceptable, in guaranteed housing situations, to say "If you create a hazard you will go to jail."
You skipped a step or two in there, but I will note that if you had real health care, the homeless adhd and such would be on their vyvanse prescriptions rather than self-medicating with meth.
First, the general stupidity: I didn't assert a single thing you claimed I did.
However, there's a reason stimulant medications are monitored by a doctor: escalating dosages due to normal tolerance needs to be distinguished from escalating dosages due to use and abuse of the medication for (initially) spurts of productivity and (eventually) avoiding the need to sleep. I can assure you that you can stay up 4 days on Vyvanse™ (i.e., fancy amphetamine) just as easily as you can on methamphetamine; the difference is the doctor and pharmacist keeping you to a sane dose, even if everyone involved is winking and nudging about whether you actually have adhd.
Imagine if addicts got a limited amount of their fix for pennies with very basic oversight, instead of screwing around with random chemicals that seem to make life bearable for a short period, but which quickly result in escalating dosages, health impacts and antisocial and criminal behaviour ultimately resulting in homelessness and incarceration with all of the social and economic costs involved in that.
You seem unwilling to say what you actually want to say. I'm more than happy to dance around it if you are.
Drug addiction and mental illness is another story.
In which case you're essentially saying "meth users decide everyone's housing status".
I'm saying reaching the state of "no homelessness" is dependent upon finding something to do with the worst of the homeless.
For a tech analogy, imagine you've architected a system that has 99.5% uptime. You might be able to imagine a way to get to 99.9% up time.
With enough resources, you might even be able to get to 99.99% uptime. With laser focus and a giant dedicated team and an immense budget, maybe you can get it to 99.995%.
But what would you do if some exec came in and said we need 100% uptime, and we are a failure as a company unless we reach that?
I don't know that at all. People in public housing that I know and see are not especially from South America.
> people removed from homes for domestic violence by court (divorce)
This is classic why the husband moves out, have you ever dealt with family courts as a male in Poland, nothing rings the bell for you? So a male homeless must be violent alcoholic, right? I'm happy that your life and family are doing okay. Once your life will turn more difficult, Polish society will dismiss you as a violent alcoholic and no help or support will be awaiting. Will reveal you one more secret, Polish male homeless are in Germany and Netherlands. Occasionally you hear about them in media when someone beats them to death or sets them on fire.
They'd happily sell but for 1mln PLN.
> people looking for something better they already have, preferably free money
They'd rent but they are also aggressively sly, dismissing every perfect tenant. In the end they indeed end up renting to another non-paying sly who will tell them exactly what they want to hear.
At this point of the real estate the market, it's the owners who want free money.
It's funny, I was as well and saw homeless everywhere, for the first time ever.
I was recently in Scandinavia and while i've seen homeless there as well, there was a noticeable increase.
Immigrants are a tiny fraction of the homeless [1]. And we’ve tried criminalising homelessness; incarceration is forced shelter and incredibly expensive.
Is there data someplace that shows it?
> I believe it is highly like
I believe that angry gods cause rain. What does it matter?
https://housing-infrastructure.canada.ca/homelessness-sans-a...
There was a 400+% increase in 2023.
https://www.toronto.ca/news/city-of-toronto-update-on-shelte...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/10933673/tor...
Whether or not a large percentage, or a large number or small number of immigrants are homeless or not,
one must assume that if 11 million people left the US next month, the price of rent in many places may go down a bit, and some currently unhoused people might be able to afford a cheaper place.
Of course another side is that wages in some industries will rise, and that may put more people into a position where they can afford an apartment.
What I'd like to see is how inexpensive optional housing can be made.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf (page 4)
So we have 350k open units and 700k people without homes, average rent is around $1500..
just looking at the data my guess is that we have about 700k people who don't have an extra 2 grand every month to put into housing. (and I think it's way higher personally, maybe not counting the couch surfing relatives who can't afford their own place, and others who are living in over crowded situations of basements )-
I'm sure there is much more to it than the averages, like a lot of the homeless are in areas where the average rent is much higher and 1500 - and the few places where rent is $800 likely has less homeless, (and also has less other things like jobs and public transit) -
and really if it is 10 million or a quarter a million empty places, I don't see how that matters if no one can afford any of them.
Does the government eminent domain the houses, arrest the homeless, and then ship them out to Detroit or wherever the surplus houses are?
We will exit an era where housing prices always rise, because both taxes and insurance will become unaffordable. I see a combination of publicly managed apartments (like Germany or Austria) with a much smaller private market for houses. The end-game is housing managed like infrastructure, with most of it publicly managed but a few privately managed/owned houses for unique or highly desirable spaces.
There is also a crisis in affordability of apartments, with a report [0] showing a collapse in lower-cost apartments that is partially driving homelessness. It is especially hard for fixed-income folks.
> arrest the homeless
Most homeless are working homeless. They crash with friends and family, or they live in their cars/trailers. Others are pushed to the periphery or out of their job market entirely; San Fransisco's struggle for service workers is a reflection of this trend, but it's hardly unique to the Bay Area. We need workers for just about everything, and those workers need a place to stay.
While this won't solve street-level homelessness, right now most homeless programs cannot move recovering people into permanent housing due to affordability and shortages. There are long waitlists right now for Housing and Urban Development subsidized housing because of the shortages. There are camp grounds or shelters, but those are only temporary. Having more stock available also means these homeless programs can provide much needed stability for recovering people and get them away from places/people that might cause them to relapse.
> Does the government eminent domain the houses
I see a collapse in house prices, and that might cause private equity to dump a bunch of housing stock into the market. To prevent a total collapse government would step in and be a buyer-of-last-resort, which will kickstart the publicly managed housing initiative. Another is insurance, where private insurers step away leaving governments to either rebuild after disaster or face a new homeless crisis. There's also banks holding a lot of mortgage paper that can go underwater forcing another intervention.
I see plenty of cases of market dysfunction that requires government to step in without explicitly eminent domain, which is why I see housing-as-infrastructure becoming the 21st century solution.
[0]: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/press-releases/new-report-shows...
Those are not people you can just stick into a house and wish them well, they need serious help for many years. In most cases that help isn't there, or comes with strings (no drugs, no alcohol) that they refuse to accept. Homelessness in the US is in many respect a mental health and substance abuse issue, exacerbated in the post-Reagan era when our mental health system was gutted and weakened.
If you want to reach those people and keep them off the streets, you need more than just empty houses.
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-...
They don't represent the same kind of societal problem that poor students, broke divorcees, and people moving through rough patches do. They also don't represent a single population that needs help they aren't provided with already, unlike the chronically homeless.
Same with homelessness.
The raw number of empty houses is irrelevant. Especially when some of those houses are temporarily uninhabitable, e.g. houses being renovated, or houses in LA right now near the wildfires.
For example, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations. If you get into the gritty details, you'll find that they have a whole bunch ofloopholes that seem to favor larger trucks & SUVs. Many people will point to these regulation as causing people to buy light trucks & SUVs, but the data seems to suggest consumers prefer to buy these vehicles and auto manufacture prefer to sell them (they are extremely profitable). I postulate that, if CAFE requirements were eliminated, the best selling vehicle in the USA would continue to be the F-series and other trucks and SUVs would continue to dominate the top 10, because the regulations are influenced by consumer preference, not the other way around.
I think the same logic applies to zoning. People largely want to own single family homes (SFH) in the suburbs; builders largely want to build SFHs in the suburbs. There's no reason to believe that changes in zoning will cause a meaningful shift in consumer and business preference. In the handful of ultra expensive metro areas, sure it might move the needle because economics trump preference, but in most of the USA, there's plenty of space to build housing. It's hard to imagine a developer in Pittsburgh choosing to build housing in an industrial area in the city over some empty land on the outskirts.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
As per econ 101, high prices are a function of scarcity relative to demand: we can reasonably claim that regulations which restrict housing development, which by their nature must increase scarcity and therefore housing costs, therefore also lead to increased rates of homelessness.
> In the handful of ultra expensive metro areas, sure it might move the needle
That's a good point, but those are exactly the places which have significant homelessness problems.
In general, this is not a housing preference issue, because opposition to upzoning does not come from people who aspire to live in single-family homes, but from people who already own them. This is a typical example:
https://www.change.org/p/whittier-neighbors-against-seattle-...
As usual with these things, the complaints include a cloud of nitpicky nonsense surrounding a central concern over "neighborhood character", which is a polite way of saying "we don't want apartment-dwelling poor people coming to live near us".
NO, it is most definitely NOT that.
It is overwhelmingly exactly what people say it is — maintaining the character of a neighborhood that everyone there has paid higher cost of entry, cost of taxes, and cost and time of maintenance and upgrades to maintain. Don't make claims in areas where you have zero knowledge just because you think it helps your point.
I'm in a small sub-/ex-urban town with a rural character which has zoning, and have been involved in local issues. I've never met a single person who feels the way you claim (although there are surely a few examples somewhere). No one looks down on the low income ppl who are here because their families were here before housing started to get tight and expensive. Most everyone either grew up here or came specifically because they WANT to live in a quieter area, have some wildlife, maintain gardens, etc. No one is avoiding poor people, they are SEEKING quiet and green spaces where you can do outdoor activities.
Moreover, saying that zoning in locales like this should be changed to accommodate low-income high-density housing is just stupid. Yes, the current homeowners could get rich subdividing their properties, razing the trees and putting up condos. Great, maybe you get a lower-income population. But getting ANYWHERE useful from here, even groceries or convenience stores, is a 5-10 mile car ride, and the rail station to the big city is 25min away by car. Any low income person is now condemned to replace housing expenses with car expenses, purchase/lease, maintenance, insurance, fuel, etc.. And, they now have a big commute reducing their time available.
It is really simple to just blame other people and yell "they're just greedy!", and it surely makes you feel better and more righteous.
It is much harder to actually figure out complex problems and create solutions that work.
I'm sympathetic to your plight seeing the character of your neighborhood change if public housing is built, but society has to balance it against the plight of people who are forced to change their neighborhood due to poverty, and on the balance their plight is simply worse than yours.
Unlike them, in such a scenario, you get to sell your land whose value now increased and go somewhere else with similar attribute.
Any society that cannot make this obvious decision to inconvenience some to save others is doomed to failure.
But NO, you obviously do not understand, let alone have any sympathy for, preserving environment and habitat. It is not merely inconvenient, what you propose is death for everything from the insects, birds, flora, fauna, and 50-year-old endangered turtle living in the wetland behind my neighborhood. Paving paradise and putting up a parking lot is not a solution.
Beyond that, you are proposing to literally steal uncounted millions of dollars of built-up value. Everyone in this area has willingly paid large amounts of extra costs and far higher taxes to maintain its character, purchase lands for greenspace preservation, trails, etc. It is not mere inconvenience you are talking about, it is literally stealing all of that extra value, and handing it to the developers who will strip the land and put up (almost universally shitty quality) buildings and pavement. You need to compensate the residents who will be displaced, not merely hand their value over to the developers, destroy the habitat and "inconvenience" the current residents.
Moreover, even if grocery and convenience stores "popup" with demand, they will still require cars to get to for almost everyone. It also fails solve the problem of where will be the JOBS or any other supplies. Most things will still be a significant drive away, and you've just solved one problem (lower housing cost) to add another — the requirement to spend money on multiple automobiles per family. And the added pollution and resource usage.
Your problem is you think there is a single simple solution that applies everywhere. You are wrong.
In some cases, it is a great solution. In others, you are literally destroying everything to gain nothing, because you can't be bothered to think about it more deeply. Any society doing that is doomed to failure.
I'm sorry, but that's not how that works. not if you really want it to happen. There's conversations between high level government officials and corporate execs to make things happen. negotiations are had, and contracts are signed. theres a city planning agency that has a CPC.
All of that is to say, there's entire industry just in the planning of cities. while we're building housing for the homeless, let's also engage them and build a viable town and start with that, and not just build the center square with hope and wishes. (Hope is not a strategy.)
It's just a simple fact that if you have a large population center, and market demand for it, basic things like grocery stores and convenience stores will pop up. Not every grocery store and convenience store is run by a large chain that negotiates with the government for a location, if you believe that's the case you are missing knowledge of that industry.
This isn't a hypothetical, things like this have been done. Just because we are overcomplicating it doesn't mean it has to be.
So, you will have just condemned every poor person you transplanted to now buying, maintaining, and insuring an automobile or several for each family. A constantly depreciating asset. Which may well cost more than they saved in rent.
"Oh, just put in public transit", you'll say. Have you ever looked at any suburban/rural bus service? They only run infrequently, and often unreliably on time, and are so now the poor people must squander massive hours of their day just waiting on the busses, or configuring their schedule around the busses.
No one else is overcomplicating it. You are massively oversimplifying it, waving your hands about, and being very loud about proclaiming your virtuous non-solution. Stop it, and think more.
There is basically nowhere a family can pay less for rent that the price of upkeeping a beater car - the residents were going to have a car either way. There's just not enough public transit in the US to avoid this reality outside of cities with high rent, especially for apartments large enough for a family.
It is not only the price of purchase, insurance, maintenance of a car, it is also the TIME you are condemning them to spend on commuting everywhere.
The solution is to make massively more residential development/redevelopment IN and NEAR the cities, such as now converting underutilized office space to residential, and not only passing regs favoring and encouraging such conversions (as is being done noe in Boston), but ALSO passing regs encouraging Remote Work.
And, where there IS public transit, encourage development there. Massachusetts is doing this, specifically encouraging conversion of offices to residential and overriding zoning laws within X distance of commuter rail stops.
Those are both good moves. But arguing for merely blanket 'develop anything anywhere' is literally stupid and will do more damage to society than any gains. There are reasons zoning was developed, and while a small part of it was racist/classist, most of it has very good reasons to exist. Simply overriding it is statist authoritarian, and saying people in their locales have no right to determine how they run their LOCAL affairs, from environmental, to historic preservation, to traffic patterns.
Plus, it's already been proven that cheap housing away from the city doesn't work. People can buy a trailer for $10-$30K and as spot for $400-1000/mth, or rentals for a bit more. But the locales are all away from the city. There are very few people who actually do it BECAUSE it is impractical to live so far from jobs in the city. If you want to house people more cheaply, it needs to be done NEAR their jobs. Destroying everything else for a bad idea will merely leave the problem unsolved, and destroy value.
I've watched towns have zoning, abandon it, then reinstate it a decade later because they saw what an awful idea it was to have none. I've seen towns that rezoned to "modernize" and destroy their character, and towns preserve their character and grow steadily into desirable locales. NONE of it is as trivial as you think.
It's a good thing I am not talking about locales like yours, then; unless your small town has a demographically-improbable homelessness problem, akin to the ones you see in big cities whose history of inadequate development due to strict zoning regulation has created a persistent housing crunch, nothing I said pertains to you.
> It is overwhelmingly exactly what people say it is — maintaining the character of a neighborhood that everyone there has paid higher cost of entry, cost of taxes, and cost and time of maintenance and upgrades to maintain.
You're not making this point of view sound any more appealing by defining "the character of a neighborhood" entirely in terms of money.
Well, the current town has no homelessness problem, but there ARE most definitely laws in place (Massachusetts 40B) that specifically seeks to override local zoning and mandate low-income housing in ALL towns.
So, while we agree that what you said should not pertain to me, the people making the actual laws most definitely apply it to me.
I don't know why there is the disconnect, perhaps some misguided "it must apply to everyone everywhere" cop-out to avoid the actual complexity, but the fact is that the rhetoric is very destructive.
>>defining "the character of a neighborhood" entirely in terms of money.
The DEFINITION is "quiet, low traffic, wildlife, gardens, etc.".
The COST is defined in money as well as work.
The point is that those things are not free — they cost a lot of work and yes, money in both taxes and improvements and maintenance. More importantly, it is not cost-free to decide to destroy those valuable things. Especially when the result will not help the people you are intending to help.
Here in Washington, the state legislature recently passed a law overriding any local zoning which would forbid multi-family housing, but the law does not apply to cities under 25K population, and its strongest provisions only apply above 75K. Oregon has had a similar law since 2019. This approach seems more reasonable to me.
I had literally to take three weeks off to kill a proposed development literally in my back yard. It is a wetland habitat, so enjoys some protection from good Massachusetts environmental laws, but they can be overridden by 40B. It is also a hilly and inaccessable site, and the developer was proposing to raze the whole site and put in 300+ units of warehouse-type condos. They literally did not even have sufficient access for fire trucks because of the terrain, and would have eliminated the habitat of an endangered turtle (found by required survey/trap-releasing).
We dug hard into the laws and process, and rallied hundreds of neighbors and political influencers in town to literally make the most packed planning board hearing they ever had, but a factor of at least 10.
This ended up killing the project, for now. But the absurdity of blanket zoning overrides literally destroying highly valuable (and costly) environment to literally solve nothing except transferring some of that value to developer's pockets has not left me. I understand it is still sad to replace brownstones with 10' square garden plots out back with high-rises, but I'm fine with that, since there really isn't any wildlife habitat and there is infrastructure to move the new people around the city. I'm not fine with doing it everywhere, particularly where it will destroy habitat and where there is no good people-moving infrastructure.
Do you force them inside?
A bit of a strawman, social service doesn't have to mean homeless shelter, so no, no one is forcing anyone to do anything. Problem is in many places at least where I live, there just isn't enough money to serve all the people that need the various levels of help.
In my city they wanted to end homelessness 25 years ago. They had enough money to do so and went ahead. They found a 1/3 refused to come in even on the coldest days for various reasons. The fight became do you let them stay and sleep on the street or do you force them into shelters/jails.
What is more humane? The let's leave them on the street but send people to feed them approach won over the forcible removals.
So homelessness remained.
When people say they want to end homelessness I don't think they realize they need to jail some of them.